Justin's Story
Justin Sanders’ life changed in the blink of an eye. One minute the 31-year-old casino manager from Detroit was planning a quiet evening with a friend. The next, he was fighting for his life, the victim of a shooting.
One bullet pierced his heart; another shattered his femur.
He was taken by ambulance to Ascension Southfield Hospital. During a procedure to remove fluid that had gathered around his heart, Justin’s heart stopped for 13 minutes. The medical team revived him, with a physician later telling his mother, Natalie, that Justin’s survival was a miracle.
Justin spent a month in the intensive care unit undergoing treatment for his wounds. He was sedated, intubated and connected to a ventilator, making slow but steady progress. Then, his heart stopped again, this time for 10 minutes. Again, he was revived.
Six weeks after his injuries, Justin was stable enough to leave Ascension’s intensive care unit for the next step in his recovery, where Justin hopefully could get back to breathing on his own. His family chose Select Specialty Hospital – Macomb, a critical illness recovery hospital known for its expertise in helping patients on ventilators to breathe independently again.
At admission, Justin had a tracheostomy, which is a surgically-made slit in his windpipe with a tube that connected to a ventilator. Justin couldn’t walk, talk, eat or think clearly. He struggled with short-term memory loss from the two times his heart stopped and his brain was denied oxygen.
His goal was to overcome those challenges and get back to his family and the job he loved.
A physician-led interdisciplinary team of nurses, therapists, dieticians and more collaborated on a plan to help him do that.
His journey to breathe on his own again began with a respiratory therapist lowering the ventilator settings so that Justin’s lungs were doing more of the work, which strengthened them.
“He (the therapist) was one of the people I appreciated most because he came into the room and explained what was going to happen. I didn’t have to ask,” Natalie said. The therapist told her what they were doing, what each of the numbers on the machine meant and which direction those numbers should head.
“They committed to getting Justin off the ventilator and it happened in like a week and a half,” she said. “That was huge to me.”
That milestone was soon followed by another. A speech-language pathologist connected a special valve to Justin’s tracheostomy that pushed air through his vocal cords, enabling Justin to speak.
“He said, ‘Hey mom,’” Natalie said, pausing to remember the magnitude of that moment. “Imagine not hearing your kid speak to you for two months.”
It was motivating for Justin, too, as he realized with each milestone that he was getting closer to the person he was before he was injured.
One of the therapies Justin enjoyed most was being able to sit in a chair again. When he arrived at Select Specialty Hospital, he’d been in bed for more than a month and had lost much of his strength. Every day, with assistance, the care team got him out of bed to sit in a chair or sit at the edge of his bed. Sitting up is therapeutic; it engages core muscles and rebuilds strength. But to Justin, it just felt good to be upright again.
The milestones kept coming. Soon Justin was able to swallow liquids and soft foods, and then there was the day that his mom arrived for a visit and Justin’s tracheostomy was being removed.
“That was a really exciting moment for me, getting to see that,” Natalie said.
Finally, Justin was able to eat again.
“To see him get real food delivered to his room and to see him eat, oh my goodness, he ate like a king!” she said.
Justin was happy with the progress he made.
“I am off the ventilator, I no longer have the trach and I can feed myself again,” he said.
Three weeks after he came to Select Specialty Hospital in a bed, Justin left in a wheelchair, ready to start the next phase of his recovery – inpatient rehabilitation at a different hospital. At that point, he wasn’t yet walking but he got back on his feet at that hospital.
Today, he is back home and was cleared by his doctor to return to work.
He and his mother are grateful for the care he received at Select Specialty Hospital.
“They rolled out the red carpet to our family when we needed them,” Natalie said. “And, I like the way they did it. They didn’t overpromise. They were very realistic about the levels at which he would recover.”